"You always know it, Watson. If you didn't, it wouldn't be penance."
After two years working as itinerant sober companion, Joan hired somebody to sell the stuff in her storage unit. In the years since then she had had few regrets. The grey silk scarf that would have been just right with a coat she saw at Goodwill, or that little dark red chair that seemed to fit anywhere and still was comfortable to sit in. Never for any of the sentimental stuff. She spent too much energy fighting the past to want to drag the physical evidence around with her any more. Or, rather, pay more than she could afford to rent a walk-in closet she never visited. As she expected, the anticipation of getting rid of it all was much worse than the aftermath.
She found this to be descriptive of the transition from client to client as well.
Spending several weeks in close quarters with someone created a bond. An artificial one that by design needed to be dissolved at the end of the contract to be considered successful, but a connection nonetheless. The tenor and tone of the connection varied extensively, an experience Joan found fascinating to observe and challenging to predict. She couldn't help the impulse to imagine what it might be like each time, based on the case file and revised at first meeting the new client, but those first impressions were always just the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes she could see the shape of the whole thing, but more often it took time to discern the nuances and flow of the interaction between companion and client. She liked that it was unpredictable within generally predictable parameters. Kept her on her toes but rarely provoked a fear of falling. Or failing.
Some clients never managed to step out of their own interior drama to enquire about her life beyond them. Others did ask how it worked, did she keep an apartment she never lived in, did she work six-weeks on, six-weeks off, or what. They were always surprised and sometimes disturbed to learn that the things she brought with her to stay with them were most of what she owned in the world. She remembered being attached to stuff and empathized with their reaction. There's no way she could have lived like this ten or fifteen years ago.
If it happens to people, it's usually through terrible circumstances: fire, imprisonment, persecution, poverty, loss. Most people don't choose to own almost nothing, especially people who could afford to hire a full-time personal sobriety coach. Which was too bad, she thought, but there it is. When she talked about it, people sometimes reacted as if she were proselytizing, so she avoided the subject as much as possible.
The last two weeks of a contract were the most predictable in terms of the fights, resistance, resentment, frustration, and fear that clients would express. Again, the specifics varied enough to keep her paying attention, but the process was the same. Clients feared change and feared never changing, and that impasse made most people unhappy.
Telling them the anticipation was the worst part never helped, but she still told them anyway. Some things were worse, obviously. She'd had two clients OD soon after she left; one recovered and last she heard was doing well. The other survived, but... And then there was Liam, but he wasn't a client, and she was (supposed to be) done worrying about him. Worry didn't help; it was much heavier and more cumbersome than boxes of old photos or the enormous vase Oren had given her as a housewarming gift for her first apartment. Sometimes she feared she'd always be stuck in the last two weeks of her time with Liam.
One of her strengths as an addiction specialist was her ability to hide her own reactions to the things clients did, and most of hers never imagined that she found the last weeks stressful too, for many of the same reasons they did. She didn't fear succumbing to addiction, of course, because she was still committed to practicing hers.
Sherlock Holmes was one of the clients who appeared to have no interest whatsoever in her life beyond its intersection with his. This turned out not to be true, but only to the extent that he could learn things about her that could be used as evidence for his interpretation of their relationship or her motivation to interfere with his plans. He rarely asked her about herself — making an exception for baldly inappropriate queries about her sex life — but always noticed when a new variable or data point appeared and then made declarations about the characteristics of this person or her feelings about that situation.
It took a while for her to realize she was volunteering a lot of information unintentionally. When she stopped doing that as much as she could, he got frustrated but still avoided asking her outright. Sometimes she thought it was out of a fierce commitment to privacy, and sometimes she thought it was a result of extreme self-centeredness. Maybe it was attic-theory, his way of practicing minimalism. Even when he hacked her phone he did so for a specific, if egregious, purpose, not to snoop. (She was pretty sure.) Until and unless it was required to solve a problem, he would not distract himself with superfluous information about anything, including her. In retrospect, his interest in Liam and his decision to join her family for dinner were obvious indications that she puzzled him.
The last two weeks with Sherlock were something else entirely. He'd been giving her mixed signals about staying with him almost since the beginning (they were not mixed at all to start). He was entirely consistent in expressing his disdain for addiction counseling but at the same time threw up relatively few roadblocks to postpone or derail their sessions together or to miss meetings. He never participated in the meetings, however, and after a month she'd given up trying to encourage him. She was quite shocked when he approached Alfredo without prompting and surprised again when she finally realized he wasn't as different from other clients as she'd thought, at least somewhat reluctant to accept her eventual departure.
Working with Sherlock was like going up a steep hill on a road made entirely of switchbacks. In the end, forward progress was made, but all the twists and turns made it hard to keep track of which way you were facing. She'd never had a client who required her to have so much faith in herself.
He'd made comments — cracks, she'd assumed for a long time — about both her potential and interest in detective work. He ramped them up dramatically a week and a half before her time was up. She found this particularly stressful because she'd been having thoughts along the same lines herself. Even if she were prepared to make a sudden career change, doing so at the urging of a client who hadn't been out of rehab very long was a singularly bad idea. She wished he would deduce that on his own but in the end she just had to tell him she had another job lined up.
She'd never had this precise response to the end of a contract before. Normally, she found herself becoming attached to some of the objects she'd used while living in their home. A favorite mug, a piece of artwork on the wall, or even a sunny room with a pleasant view. When she wanted to keep more stuff than would fit in her luggage, she knew it was time to start her own exit protocols to be ready to let go.
Sherlock's house was filled with fascinating, mysterious, baffling, and occasionally horrifying things, in addition to all his books and papers and the lovely old bones of the building itself. It was frankly a joy to live in, particularly for a short period of time during which she was responsible for maintaining none of it. What would be involved in dealing with the honey leak, to start? Not her problem.
When she imagined working with Sherlock, she always pictured living in the house too; it was inseparable from his process. In the extended versions of these fantasies, certain home improvements were featured, such as a second bathroom. Hiring a cleaning service. The honey. But there was nothing she coveted, nothing she wished she could slip into her bags. And that was the problem. There was nothing she wanted to take. Because she did not want to leave.
Joan also was rarely conflicted about the decisions she made. Making them was not always a simple clear-cut process, but once it was done, she could usually move on without looking back. The times this was not the case tended to be spectacular failures, unfortunately. Taking Liam back that third time. The surgical incident. She didn't know whether lying to Sherlock about staying would be one of those.
She had rejected suggestions from her therapist and her family (and herself) that getting rid of her stuff was punishment for some of those failures. Minimalism can look like penance, but it's not, for her. She loved it. At first it might have come out of a desire not to want, not to have to face loss. But once her things were gone, she understood it actually enabled a power to choose. It wasn't about denying anything; it was about choosing what she wanted and not being limited or defined by what she didn't need.
In the moment that Sherlock asked her "What is it?" she knew what she wanted and didn't hesitate. Why and how shadowed her certainty but did not blunt it. Telling him that his father had agreed to extend her contract was the first risk she'd taken in years, and she felt like she was flying. Flying through a war zone at night, perhaps, not knowing whether the next missile would come from Moriarty, Sherlock's father, or Sherlock himself. It was spontaneous and dangerous and likely to fail. It was also exhilarating.
The panic she felt immediately after deceiving Sherlock was not from the repercussions that would follow when he found out (though that was coming). It was for feeling that excitement, the risk. The pleasure of the unknown in the moment of action — all those possibilities — was what she'd given up. It was ironic, or maybe inevitable, that exposure to Sherlock's relentless drive to solve mysteries would revive her desire to revel in them. He was wrong about penance; it was perhaps the most punishing when you weren't aware of what you kept from yourself: Much harder to know when you could stop paying your debt if you didn't realize you were doing it.
Sherlock had said he regretted the way their last week had gone, but on the other side of it, she felt something else. Not hope, exactly; that was much too optimistic. But there was a kind of progress. When he lunged for revenge he had ripped away some of the layers he'd been hiding behind. She knew there were more; she wasn't foolish enough to believe he'd revealed everything important about Irene or the aftermath of her murder or the other parts of himself that had brought him down. No doubt new layers of scar tissue were already forming over the latest trauma.
Knowing what she knew now wasn't going to make any of this easier for her. Or for him. But it was more, more information, more shared history between them, more trust, perhaps. She wasn't sure exactly who the man was that night in the house, coldly earnest about the violence he planned to inflict. That man trusted her and didn't worry about what she might do with the information he imparted; his singular focus had freed him from such prosaic concerns. The man in front of her this morning, relieved and steadied by the news that she would not be leaving just yet, might not trust her the same way. Would not, once he found out she was lying. This man cared about many things, known and unknown.
Wanting. Caring. Knowing. Choosing.
Flying.
If she gave away her security, her predictable comfortable professional box, what might she regret? Well, not "if". It was already gone, and she hadn't even noticed. So, no regrets, then. She was free to choose, even if she hadn't recognized it, and had chosen. Now she had to rectify her mistake and give him the same freedom, the same choice. He might fail, or he might need to let her go. But those things could happen at any time; that was the mystery she loved, the vast unpredictable unknown of it all, interwoven with the science of fact and deduction and reason he was guided by.
She didn't know if he was ready, but she was. Maybe that would be enough to start. Anticipation was worse.
"Sherlock, I need to talk to you about something."